A bolt of lightning strikes deep inside a California forest in the middle of the night.
The spark becomes a flame, and within seconds, a satellite dish swirling overhead picks up on the anomaly and triggers an alarm. An autonomous helicopter takes flight and zooms toward the fire, using sensors to locate the blaze and artificial intelligence to generate a plan of attack. It measures the wind speed and fire movement, communicating constantly with the unmanned helicopter behind it, and the one behind that.
Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.
Once over the site, it drops a load of water and soon the flames are smoldering. Without deploying a single human, the fire never grows larger than 10 square feet.
This is the future of firefighting.
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*Image credit: An autonomous Black Hawk helicopter, part of new California wildfire fighting technology, at Million Air on April 25 in Hesperia. (Los Angeles Times; Carlin Stiehl/Los Angeles Times)